 THE FAMOUS New York firm of St Martin's Press, which had
previously published several books by David Irving
and requested him to provide jacket-puffs to promote the
works of their other authors, contracted to publish his
biography Goebbels.
Mastermind of the Third Reich in April 1996. SMP
came under savage assault from the Anti-Defamation
League (ADL) from February 1996, and their chairman
Tom McCormack, who had visited Irving in London and
dined with him over the previous years, suddenly became A
Denier. SMP dumped the book, the product of eight years'
research, in an unprecedented action of jibbering, craven,
panic. | * This file contains some items lifted off
other Websites, to whose owners we express
thanks |
| "Jewish
Methods..."
Pages 191-191 fromKevin
MacDonald: Separation
and Its Discontents, Toward an Evolutionary
Theory of Anti-Semitism (Praeger Publishers, Westport, Connecticut,
1998) Professor
Macdonald is professor of psychology at
California State University, Long Beach.
|
Back to SMP Scandal Index.
[For more items of
the
twenty year
campaign of
agitation by the ADL against David Irving, see the file
on the Board of Deputies]
|
190 Separation and
Its DiscontentsJews engaged in a very wide range of activities to
combat anti-Semitism in Germany in the period from 1870
to 1914, including the formation of self-defense
committees (e.g., the Zentralverein deutscher
Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens whose name
-- Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith
-- was meant to suggest that Jews constitute a community
of religious faith), lobbying the government, utilizing
and influencing the legal system (e.g. taking advantage
of libel and slander Jaws to force anti-Jewish
organizations into bankruptcy), writing apologias and
tracts for distribution to the masses of gentile Germans,
and funding organizations opposed to anti-Semitism that
were not overtly Jewish (Ragins 1980, 23ff). A major consequence of these activities was to make
anti-Semitism a disreputable, unsavory enterprise. The
Zentralverein successfully pursued legal actions
against every major anti-Jewish leader, with the result
that not only were there severe financial repercussions
for the anti-Semitic movement, but, more impor-tantly,
because of the high prestige of the legal system among
Wilhelminian Germans, convicted individuals lost their
status among large segments of the public and even within
the anti-Semitic movement itself (Levy 1975, 158-159).
Similarly the Zentralverein commissioned writings
in opposition to "scientific anti-Semitism," as
exemplified by academically respectable publications that
portrayed Judaism in negative terms. The
Zentralverein monitored academic works for such
material and sometimes succeeded in banning offending
books and getting publishers to alter offensive passages.
The result was to render such ideas academically and
intellectually disreputable. Similar examples are provided in Chapter 2 where it
was mentioned that a theme of anti-Semitism has been that
Jewish organizations have used their power to make the
discussion of Jewish interests off limits, and that
individuals who had made remarks critical of Jews were
forced to make public apologies and suffered professional
difficulties as a result. In recent cases illustrating
this theme, the ADL
successfully pressured St.
Martin's Press to rescind publication of David
Irving's biography of Goebbels (Washington Post,
April 4, 1996) after an article by editorial columnist
Frank Rich condemning the book appeared in the New
York Times (April 3, 1996).[10]
The ADL also pressured the American Psychological
Association to defer presenting a lifetime achievement
award to Dr. Raymond B. Cattell because of Cattell's
alleged "commitment to racial supremacy theories" (New
York Times, August 15, 1997).[11] The AJCommittee has also engaged in a wide range of
activities to minimize anti-Semitism and pursue Jewish
interests, including writing and distributing articles on
the situation in czarist Russia, the fraudulent nature of
the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the
benefits of immigration. Position papers were prepared on
Jewish life in Eastern Europe prior to requesting
intervention by the American government. Scholarly
treatises were prepared in an effort to empha-size Jewish
contributions to civilization and rebut the anti-Semitism
of such intellectuals as Houston Stewart Chamberlain
(Cohen 1972, 34). |
Jewish Strategies for
Combating Anti-Semitism 191 In recent times Jewish strategy has often included
attempts to mold personal beliefs via the mass media. The
Dreyfus Affair in fin de siècle France "saw
the emergence, for the first time, of a distinct class of
intellectuals . . . as a major power in European society
and among whom emancipated Jews were an important,
sometimes a dominant, element. A new issue was raised,
not just for France: Who controls our culture?" (Johnson
1988, 387). "The young Jewish intellectuals, and their
growing band of radical allies, began by asking for
Justice and ended by seeking total victory and revenge.
In doing so, they gave their enemies an awesome
demonstration of Jewish and philosemitic intellectual
power" (Johnson 1988, 388). While at the beginning of the
affair the media was controlled by the anti-Semites, by
the end of it, fully 90 percent of the literature on the
subject was pro-Dreyfus. This campaign involved
newspapers, photogra-phy, and cinema and gradually it
tilted public opinion in favor of
Dreyfus.[12] Sachar (1992) provides several examples of the use of
the mass media to promote Jewish causes, some of which
were originally perceived as being opposed to majority
interests. In the campaign against czarist Jewish policy
in the 1890s, Oscar Straus and Jacob Schiff were able to
secure highly sympathetic treatments in the New York
Times, owned by their friend Adolph Ochs, also a law.
The AJCommittee's Louis Marshall also persuaded Ochs to
provide press coverage favorable to Leo Frank (Ivers
1995, 41). (Frank, the manager of a pencil factory, was
convicted in the murder of a 14-year-old female employee
in 1913). This attempt backfired; Southerners reacted
negatively to attempts by a northern, Jewish-owned
newspaper to influence events in the South. (It is also
interesting that Marshall insisted that Ochs not mention
that Frank was Jewish or that anti-Semitism was involved
in the prosecution -- another instance in interests were
perceived as best served by crypsis.) Another example of media manipulation was the effort
expended to abrogate the Russian trade agreement of 1832.
Over a period of three years (1908-1911), the AJCommittee
overcame complete apathy among the public and also
widespread official concern about American commercial and
foreign policy interests to achieve a complete victory
(Cohen 1972, 54ff). Although the purpose of the campaign
was to change Russian policy toward its Jews, the pretext
was Russia's denial of visas to four American Jews and
the inability of twenty-eight American Jews living in
Russia to travel freely. Thousands of copies of speeches
by the Jewish activist Louis Marshall (who never
mentioned the plight of Russian Jewry) and Herbert
Parsons (a non-Jewish congressman from New York) were
distributed to national and state politicians,
newspapers, magazines, judges and lawyers, clergy,
educators, and fraternal organizations. The AJCommittee
provided material for articles in the popular media and
distributed rebuttals when opposing positions appeared in
the media. Political bodies ranging from Congress to
state legislatures were intensely lobbied to pass
pro-abrogation resolutions. Rallies with prominent
gentile speakers were held, including one in New York
whose participants included Governor Woodrow Wilson of
New Jersey (who later, as president, endorsed the Balfour
Declara- |
Endnote 10: "10: Jewish academics
were also successful in getting the American
Historical Association (AHA) to condemn the idea that
the Holocaust never happened or has been greatly
exaggerated, and recently the AHA rejected the thesis
that Jews were disproportionately involved in the
Atlantic slave trade or as exploiters of slaves, as
maintained by the book The Secret relationship
Between Blacks and Jews, published by the Nation
of Islam (Los Angeles Times, B.12, February 18,
1995)."
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